By John Harris.
Routledge
£16.99
ISBN 0 415 224 888   

Social work in the pre-business era, according to this trenchant volume, was free to set its own agenda and social services departments, suffused with a social democratic ethos, to shape their own distinctive policies. Then the business era arrived with the Conservative governments from the 1980s.

Although the story has been told before no other volume has pursued this professional makeover - the complete inversion of social work's aims - so rigorously and in such detail.

Along the way Harris includes a wickedly accurate picture of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work's flailing efforts to hitch a ride on this particular wagon; a sceptical and probably justified assessment of the voluntary sector's role in the process; and an account of the Labour's government's modification - but not undoing - of the business ethos.

Harris might have acknowledged the relatively larger space for public, non-market objectives within new Labour social policy.

For example, is Best Value to be understood only as a "quasi-business regime"? Yet if he presses his argument a little too far on occasion we have a much clearer, more detailed understanding of the direction that social work is taking.

John Pierson is senior lecturer, Institute of Social Work and Applied Social Studies, Staffordshire University.